


Echo

by link621



Series: The Raven [2]
Category: Tokyo Babylon
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-08-30
Updated: 2004-08-30
Packaged: 2017-11-25 10:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/link621/pseuds/link621
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Subaru shows up too late for a job and is in turn presented with a challenging dilemma. A second spiritual successor to "The Raven."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echo

There were exactly thirteen stairs to the landing and another twelve up to the third floor apartment where his client lived. Each stair was evenly spaced metal, punched full of holes; a small section of the street beyond clearly visible between the stairs. A metal guardrail, painted black but long-since badly chipped, kept him from counting the very seconds until the staircase became a tragedy worthy of a Shakespeare play.   
  
His every nerve was being tested—the dark night only gave way to small halos of light below the streetlamps echoed in pools of water on the ground in the alley. The wind swept up from below, catching his coat, threatening to tear his hat from his head, and seeping through his insubstantial shirt, reminding him that it was late September at that the rain had brought with it cool, moist air. His lips were chapped, his throat dry, and each breath was like a personal insult; nature was mocking his misfortune.  
  
Echoing through the alley was the vague sound of cars in the distance and the too-loud click of a man below him opening the cap of a sliver Zippo lighter, the smell of tobacco smoke soon drifting up to him and mixing with the distant smell of wet pavement. From somewhere above—somewhere in that third-floor apartment—there came continuous blood-curdling shrieks of terror that both dissuaded him and convinced him he should hurry forward, lest something horrible happen.  
  
By the time he had made it to the window that opened out to the fire escape, a new sort of “smell” came at him, but not one he necessarily sensed with his nose. Decay, blood, hatred, fear; this was the scent of death. It was a stale smell; one that instantly triggered revulsion and the immediate sensation that he might regurgitate all he had eaten that day. This was his area of expertise—his job. He had no choice but to go in.  
  
The window had not been opened; shattered glass on the landing below him was testimony to the fact that it had been violently destroyed, leaving even the lacy yellow curtains in tatters over the sides of the window. He reached up a hand to pull himself through the window, instantly pulling back with a shocked yelp, blood already welling up thick and bright read across his white glove. Taking a better look at the window, he could see, despite the dark, that shards of broken glass remained around the edges of the window.  
  
He slid his coat from his shoulders, heavy white cloth sliding easily over his pale, bare arms. With a few quick motions, he tore off enough cloth to wrap around his hands several times, bunching the rest of the coat over the lower part of the window frame. It took a low bow to duck away from the top of the window enough to get in as his hands closed once more over the jagged edges of the window and he slid through the threshold into the apartment.  
  
As it had been outside, the apartment was dark—though, the shrieks were many times louder. The smell of death had become overpowering, as he almost fell to his knees trying to properly balance himself against a table just within the window. There was one dead—he could see the spirit of the recently deceased curiously examining her body as though trying to figure out what it was she was looking at. Stepping forward two paces, Subaru joined her. Abruptly, the screaming ceased.  
  
There was an arm fully intact—the left arm—with a thin gold band on the ring finger. What was probably the chest cavity, he thought he could see ribs poking out, was a half-meter from the arm, piled with the long-mangled legs that were nothing but inconsistent amounts of muscle covering exposed bone. The abdomen was more or less intact, clearly belonging to a woman, but separated from the chest and legs. The second arm was nowhere in sight, and he had not the heart to attempt to locate the head.  
  
The young medium turned his attention back to the spirit, prepared to send her on properly. Surprisingly, though, she did not seem horribly phased. “She killed herself,” the woman explained evenly. “To create some horrible monster that would kill me, too. But, she won’t stop shrieking.”  
  
“She’s stopped now.” Letting the cloth drop from his gloved hands—cloth that he had not even realized he was still clutching—Subaru instead fished through his pocket for an oufuda. “Who is she?”  
  
“My partner.” The spirit bit at her lip, something she had probably also done in life. “We were both on the police force in the same precinct for years before we were assigned as partners. We’ve always been close, but she’s been so strange since I became engaged.” She tilted her head to Subaru thoughtfully. “She was in love with me, and she never told me before tonight.”  
  
It could be a bad sign that the spirit was so calm—very few handled their own death, especially their own violent death, so easily. “And, your fiancée?”   
  
“He was dead when I came home,” the spirit explained. “He was the one who called you. He came home to find what he thought was a curse drawn onto the sheets of our bed—drawn in blood.” It had to be shock—the spirit’s voice never wavered or bordered on hysteria, as it should have. “She cut off her own finger to do it—to write the curse.”   
  
The police should have been called by now. A police officer, of anyone, should have known that. “May I use your phone?” It seemed a strange thing to ask a spirit, but it was encouraging to get a nod in return. “There is nothing more I can do, here, but exorcise any remaining bad spirits and call the police to deal with…”  
  
“…My remains.” The spirit filled in. She was truly strong, perhaps. Maybe years of working in her field had prepared her for such horrors as she faced in looking at her own body, mangled on the floor.  
  
Subaru frowned. “Please move on. There is nothing left for you in this world.” To his surprise, this did not seem to be a particular issue to the spirit, either, who abandoned him only long enough to see her husband’s body in the bedroom before he felt her pass from the apartment entirely.  
  
To find the phone, Subaru went into the kitchen. He reached for the light switch, regretting it immediately as he saw the third dead body in the apartment. She was covered in blood, probably none of her own, and missing her ring finger on the left hand. An oufuda was pressed onto her back; coupled with the magic circle that was drawn in blood around the table, he could only guess that the unfortunate lover had killed herself to attempt to bind her soul to the woman she loved. Like most curses attempted by an armature, it had turned against her—instead reviving her soul in her own corpse and forcing her to kill her most precious person.  
  
Feeling even more unsettled by that realization than he had in the face of gore in the den Subaru went to the phone, only to discover the cord was cut. He would have to go to a neighbor to call the police. First, he wanted out of the apartment that now smelled overwhelmingly of things that should have never been exposed to the air and absolutely reeked of jealousy and pain.  
  
In the doorway of the kitchen, though, stood a second spirit—this one with long black hair and fair skin like the cadaver behind Subaru. “It didn’t work. Even in the end, she’ll never remember me.” Her voice was strained from shrieking—she sounded almost as though she might cry, if she had the capacity to cry any longer. “In the end, it’s all for nothing.”  
  
A woman trapped in unrequited forbidden love stood before him bearing her soul and he was entirely tongue-tied. Perhaps he could just say that he sympathized. “I don’t think she knew, until the end.” He tried to offer a smile. “Perhaps now that she knows, you can find some way to be happy.” He glanced away, his eyes drifting down. “I love someone, too. If I were to lose him, I would want to die—I don’t think you were wrong.”  
  
When he looked back up, the spirit was suddenly directly in front of him, close enough to kiss, were she corporeal. “You’re too young to know,” she spat angrily, “That you can never have what you want. You have to be willing to give up something so precious to you that you simply cannot part with it in order to obtain what you want. The more you want something, the more precious the price.” She moved away again like lightening, darting back to the door.   
  
“Something precious?” The boy echoed. He could only think of two things in the world so precious to him he could not part with them. “You need to move on; you have another chance beyond this world.”  
  
“You really believe that?” She raised an eyebrow at him.  
  
“Yes, I do.” He offered a small smile in return. The spirit, like the first, did not put up any fight, moving on without even having to be sent, fading away from Subaru’s peripheral senses. All that was left was the overwhelming smell of dead flesh soaked in too-fresh blood.  
  
He went out the way he came, this time hardly noticing that he gained two more small cuts as he shoved himself through the window or that he would have to leave his mangled coat behind. A sudden gust of wind lifted his hat from his head, and he did not even miss it as it spiraled upward before drifting off over the roof, somewhere.  
  
He took the stairs down two at a time—not because they were short but because his feet were slipping and missing the edge of the stair, nearly throwing him forward with each shaky step. At the base of the stairs, he nicked the edge of the third stair up, falling onto his back on the metal stairs, pain instantly blooming from every point of contact, including, he noted dimly, the base of his skull.  
  
“Subaru-kun!” His ears were ringing, and his vision had just flickered back from white as the man reached his side, carefully lifting him from the stairs. He could tell the man was still talking, just not what he was saying.  
  
“Call the police,” Subaru insisted, interrupting whatever the man was saying. His voice sounded odd—as though it had only made it through his own head and would not carry past his lips.   
  
Somewhere along the line he was sitting down—vomiting until he felt empty and dry with tears of stress coming from the sides of his eyes—and a warm hand was rubbing circles on his back. He could never get used to this—the pain, the smell, the sight. Over the years, he had grown better at facing death calmly, though he never improved upon the inevitable eventual reaction that would hit him the moment he got out the door. He would never be able to face such a scene and feel nothing; he just was too kind.   
  
He could feel himself being urged toward another warm body, the arm around his shoulders compelling him sideways until he was comfortably rested somewhere he should not have allowed himself to be so comfortable. He was in love—that he could no longer even attempt to deny—but it was a love he could never let flourish. Despite what his sister said, it was simply not acceptable; especially not for an heir to a long line of spiritualists.   
  
Perhaps that was what he had to give up, if the spirit was right. To love whom he loved, he could no longer be a Sumeragi. Something told him that was not right, though, but he had not the energy to think about what she could have possibly meant.  
  
“You’re bleeding, Subaru-kun.” The man’s voice sounded strangely calm—too calm. He normally would fuss over Subaru like a clumsy child. “I think you need stitches.”  
  
“An ambulance will come with the police,” the boy replied lightly, closing his eyes. Distantly, the sound of approaching sirens mixed with that of general traffic and the after-effects of the ringing in Subaru’s ears. It was getting colder—or perhaps Subaru was going into shock.   
  
Subconsciously, perhaps, he thought it might be good for him if he was no longer a Sumeragi—Seishirou would take care of him; no one would ever hurt him again.

 


End file.
